Minnesota crime writer Carl Brookins has done it all, from teaching to sailing the deep blue sea.
Sailing, yes—wind-driven boats.
Big ones.
And he's spun those experiences into a mystery series.
Carl Brookins, from high seas to protected waters
"I've sailed almost everything I'm qualified to sail," crime writer Carl Brookins says, "from a 55-foot Swan down to 12-foot open Vees."
A Sunfish? That's really small.
"I've never actually sailed a Sunfish, I don't know why. Little boats are fun to sail because they're so responsive, and you're right close to the water. It's a different kind of sailing experience from the big boats."
Brookins writes a mystery series that features a sailing couple. What I was curious about is whatever told him he could turn his sailing adventures into crime stories.
Brookins was approaching retirement.
"It's important to know that all my jobs involved some kind of writing, so working with words is a part of my DNA," he says.
"So when I was getting close to retirement, my wife, who had already retired, asked me, 'What are you going to do now, Carl?'
"Now I had always read a lot of crime fiction, and I would sometimes get angry at the flaws in the books, and I'd yell at the page. One day, my wife said, 'If you're so smart, why don't you try writing one of those?'
"I said, 'Maybe I will.'
"Jean's a publisher—a long-time publisher for the Minnesota Historical Society—so she said, 'If you're gonna do that, write about something you know—like sailing—and, if you're going to do this, take a class someplace and find out what it is that you don't know about writing mysteries.'"
Brookins did just that. He went to The Loft in Minneapolis and took a course from Mary Logue on how to write a mystery.
"She's a really good writer and a poet and a really good teacher. She's written a mystery series set near Lake Pepin that's done very well."
A bit later, Carl and Jean were sailing the Inside Passageway—spectacular scenery along British Columbia. She nudged him to write about it, to use it as a setting for a mystery.
The book that resulted became Inner Passages.
"The original manuscript had a lot about my protagonist, Michael Tanner's descent into alcoholism and the loss of his wife," Brookins says. "My publisher said, 'Too much. Let's cut some of it.' So the title isn't quite as accurate as when I envisioned the book."
That book came out in 2000—Brookins' first.
He followed that in his Michael Tanner/Mary Whitney sailing mystery series with three stories set in and around the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior, A Superior Mystery (2002), Old Silver (2005), and Devils Island (2009).
Brookins set Red Sky, his newest book in the series (out this year), in the British Virgin Islands.
After three books in the sailing mystery series, he set out to write a private detective story.
Of course, to do that, you need a PI. And as the writer/creator, you want him to be distinctive—memorable.
Enter Sean Sean.
"For a long time, I didn't know where Sean Sean came from," Brookins says. "I've come to realize he has a lot of the characteristics of a man I got to know in the service back in the 1950s."
Brookins was stationed in Washington, DC, at the time.
"They didn't have the right kind of living facilities for us on the base, so they paid us to get out of sight, to move off the base. So I hooked up with a man named George, and we rented an apartment in D.C."
Ready? Here it comes.
"George was short and feisty, a little like a banty rooster—like a lot of really short people who often feel put upon because of their height. He turned out to be the model for Sean Sean."
All right, a short, feisty guy, but that name?
"There's no rational answer for this," Brookins says. "It just came to me. It also came to me that same day that he should not have a middle name. His first and last names are the same, and it works. I like the way his name sounds. I like the way it looks on the page."
Brookins has three books in that series, The Case of the Greedy Lawyers (2005), The Case of the Deceiving Don (2008), and The Case of the Great Train Robbery (2010).
He also has a third mystery series out, this one set in an urban college. Two books here, Bloody Halls (2008) and Reunion (2010).
For more about Brookins and his books, pop over to his website, carlbrookins.com.
© Jerry Peterson.
